Ashley Fetters in the Atlantic laments and explores America’s greatest endangered species: Pubic Hair. She points the finger at Carrie Bradshaw (huh? Sex in the City had lots of pubic grooming talk in it?) and Barbie (lol) but even bigger than those two culprits? Blame teh Pornz:
Although sex, hygiene, and clothing are all contributing factors, Fitzpatrick, Herbenick, and Pinto all agree that there’s one main driving force behind America’s villainization of pubic hair: pornography.
When a team of researchers from George Washington University took a closer look at Playboy‘s representations of women’s genitalia throughout the years, they found that in issues dating from the magazine’s inception in 1953 up through the 1970s and ’80s, more than 95 percent of the centerfolds and naked models sported full, apparently natural pubic hair.
In the late 20th century, though, that changed. As Joseph Slade, professor of media and culture at Ohio University, puts it, the media legitimized voyeurism and turned it into a way of life; suddenly, porn viewers wanted to see everything more deeply and without the veil of hair. Thus, Playboy‘s love affair with the au naturel look faded: By the 1990s, more than a third of the models appeared to have removed some of their pubic hair. And in the new millennium, less than 10 percent of nude models now sport the full pubic bush, while a third remove their hair partially and one-quarter remove it completely. Playboy has trimmed down the standard from the un-modified, detail-obscuring “fur bikini” it helped popularize in the 1960s to the vanishing act it promotes today.
Hugh Hefner’s magazine, however, isn’t the only supporter of the tress-less treasure chest. Rather, says Slade, genital alopecia seems to have hit the entire adult entertainment industry. “Depilation took hold in visual porn in the 1990s, though some actresses trimmed for movies before then,” Slade says. “It was easier to keep crotches cleaner on the set. But certainly the practice is widespread in video porn today. Enough so that backlash has created a niche fetish for ‘full bushes.'”
But while the sleek, slick, bare labia majora is more common in visual porn today than ever before, the stylized hairless vulva has actually been around for centuries. According to Slade, as far back as the 15th century, women — especially prostitutes — often shaved their pubic hair to avoid lice infestation, which is where having a muff may have picked up its stigma of being “unclean.” In the years following, medieval and classical European sculptors and painters omitted pubic hair from depictions of female nudes; In fact, the notion of pubic hair in general was so unholy that every last naked prophet on the Sistine Chapel ceiling is completely hairless below the neck. But life didn’t dare imitate art — at least, that is, not until Playboy.
Read the whole article for a study that reports that women under 30 are up to 3 times more likely to have no public hair than women over 30, and my favorite part: this story of one womans recollection of how her high school boyfriend got excited when she finally got rid of the bush once a month:
Though Pinto says sex has never felt any different to her without pubic hair (“Once we get going, who cares?” she says with a laugh), there certainly remains a sexual motive for taking it all off: Drawing back the curtain of pubic hair exposes the clitoris, the labia and the vagina for plain viewing. There’s a tactile element, too: As one elated young husband named Mark explained to Glamour in 2009, “The skin down there is protected — it never really touches anything, it never sees the sun — so it’s ridiculously soft.
“You can’t really tell how soft it is until a woman waxes. Oh my God, you can’t believe how soft it is when you wax,” 28-year-old Mark gushed. “It’s extremely, extremely soft, so it feels great when you have sex.”
Pinto’s past boyfriends, she says, would wholeheartedly agree. “Once, I started dating someone when I hadn’t waxed in a while,” she says, “And then when I did, he went, Oh! This is awesome! Why didn’t you do this before?!”
“That was my senior year of high school,” she adds. “So every month I would text him, ‘Guess who’s getting a wax!’ And he’d be like, ‘Smiley face, so excited!'”